The Artist

Mickey Hart's visionary body of work combines music, science, and the visual arts.

Best known as a drummer in the renowned expedition into the soul and spirit of rock and roll that is the Grateful Dead, multi-GRAMMY Award winner Mickey Hart is also an accomplished writer, energetic painter, restless explorer, and an acclaimed expert on the history and mythology of drums. A true original, armed with an inventor's audacious curiosity, Hart boldly seeks to break the rhythm code of the universe and investigate its deepest vibrations.

Hart’s fascination with rhythm has driven him to seek sound in unexpected places. He explored the sounds of humanity’s earliest music with his groundbreaking At The Edge (1990), and gathered the world’s greatest percussion heavyweights to collaborate on the groundbreaking Planet Drum (1991). Both recordings were partner projects with his critically-acclaimed books for Harper San Francisco – Drumming At The Edge Of Magic and Planet Drum. His album Planet Drum went on to win the first-ever GRAMMY Award in the World Music category. He would dominate the award category again in 2008 with his Global Drum Project.

As a visual artist, Hart found immediate success in the art market. His first one man show @ Wentworth Gallery in 2016 was the single best opening show in the gallery’s 30+ years in business.

Throughout the 1990s, Hart produced his acclaimed series, The World -- showcasing such global percussion greats as Babatunde Olatunji, Zakir Hussain, and Hamza El Din; groundbreaking releases by Tibet’s Gyuto Monks and the Latvian Women’s Choir; and several of his own classic solo projects. He additionally produced a series of archival recordings for The Endangered Music Project (1993), in tandem with the Library of Congress.

On October 11, 2011, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings released the 'Mickey Hart Collection' to preserve and further the Grateful Dead percussionist's endeavor to cross borders and expand musical horizons.

Hart has collaborated with astrophysicists to create music reflecting the origins of the universe. He recorded vibrations from the Golden Gate Bridge -- which he described as a giant wind harp -- and collected data from stem cells, heartbeats, and brainwaves in order to produce compositions. These pursuits culminated in two recordings: Mysterium Tremendum (2012), using sounds from the cosmos via NASA, and Superorganism (2013), with sounds sourced directly from electrical signals in Hart’s own brain.

His writings have also documented a lifelong fascination with the history and mythology of music. Hart’s books include Drumming at the Edge of Magic, Planet Drum (Harper San Francisco); Spirit into Sound: The Magic of Music (Grateful Dead Books), and Songcatchers: In Search of the World's Music (National Geographic).

“Underneath the world’s extraordinary musical diversity is another, deeper realm,” said Hart about his lifelong quest to explore rhythm. “There is no better or worse, no music versus folk music, no distinctions at all, but rather an almost organic compulsion to translate the emotional fact of being alive into sound, into rhythm, into something you can dance to.”

Hart's ongoing research has led him to explore how his own brain cells respond to rhythm. His work with Dr. Adam Gazzaley, a leading neuroscientist at UCSF, seeks ways to identify rhythms that can stimulate different parts of diseased and damaged brains. Hart has spoken and testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Aging about the promising potential for rhythm and music therapy.

Hart’s near-mythic career, now spanning 50 years, recently achieved another pinnacle: reaching new generations in a series of record-breaking shows. In the summer of 2015, Hart joined the other surviving Grateful Dead members -- Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzmann – to create the historic Fare Thee Well concerts. The Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary celebration weekend proved to be among the most successful events in the history of live entertainment, with the legendary band’s three final nights at Chicago’s Soldier Field smashing all-time attendance records.

Today, Hart continues his long, strange Grateful Dead trip with Kreutzmann and Weir -- and now John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge, and Jeff Chimenti -- in Dead & Company. The new superband launched a nationwide tour in October 2015, playing sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden and beyond, and garnering widespread praise from critics, Deadheads, and new fans alike. “Hart and Kreutzmann got a chance to take center stage, hypnotizing the crowd with a 10-minute riff on drums and percussion leading up to the big finale,” noted USA Today.

Universal Music Group and Mickey Hart have formed a new partnership, which takes Hart into the studio again to create a new album that will be released with Verve Label Group in 2017. Hart is also bringing his extensive historical body of work to UMe, naming them as his partners for catalogue initiatives.